Noah Berlatsky thinks we ought to stop comparing the NSA to 1984 and start comparing it to Philip K. Dick, suggesting that understanding the surveillance state through the lens of Orwell neglects the ways the impact of that surveillance power hits some more than others:
Using Orwell to understand NSA spying, then, ends up functioning as a distortion by metaphor. It suggests that all of us are equally targeted, and that the problem is that all of us are equally targeted—that middle-class non-marginal people are going to be stomped by Big Brother. The truth, though, is that the NSA data will likely be used primarily, as it always has been, against the androids and the Zhangs—which is why we need to try to find a metaphor that addresses not just liberty, but justice.
Berlatsky also opens with the data/narrative binary I’ve been floating occasionally in class:
As any intelligence operative knows, isolated facts don’t tell you much. If some random person mentions a bomb somewhere on the Internet, is that a threat? A joke? A mistake? To understand data you need a context and a narrative. You need to be able to put it in a story.
Berlatsky’s piece very usefully gets to part of why this surveillance culture stuff (and not just the material/technological/political facts of surveillance itself) matters so much. For one thing, our myopic focus on Orwell as the Grand Explainer of the Surveillance State starkly delimits how journalists talk about surveillance; a fascinating PEN American Center analysis of journalistic writeups of the 2013 NSA spying scandal found that 1984 was literally the only literary analogy journalists ever used in that context. This affects the way we think about surveillance in some very specific ways:
Examining the work of 105 authors and 60 news outlets over two months, PEN found that journalists most often used metaphors of collecting (9.31 percent), but other approaches included nautical metaphors (tentacles, trawling, leviathan), war metaphors (blitz, invade), and metaphors of authoritarianism (totalitarian, police state, Nazi.)
In fairness, PKD is not the only alternative to Orwell in terms of parsing the surveillance state through fiction. Others have suggested, for instance, that Kafka (the one who’s not enrolled in ENGL262) is a more apt lens than Orwell. Berlatsky also mentions Maureen McHugh’s rightly praised China Mountain Zhang as a model, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone who might be interested.